I was going to vent about how terrible the latest versions of the healthcare bill are, and how the GOP and "Blue Dog Democrats" are helping big industry damage our country, but economist Robert Reich has already done so very concisely:
Our private, for-profit health insurance system, designed to fatten the profits of private health insurers and Big Pharma, is about to be turned over to ... our private, for-profit health care system. Except that now private health insurers and Big Pharma will be getting some 30 million additional customers, paid for by the rest of us.
As for the bogus non-public non-option that's left:
It's a token public option, an ersatz public option, a fleeting gesture toward the idea of a public option, so small and desiccated as to be barely worth mentioning except for the fact that it still (gasp) contains the word "public."
Meanwhile, Nicholas Kristof describes in his NYT column today how we keep repeating the same non-sensical arguments from the same corrupt groups without learning a thing:
Today we have Sarah Palin's "Death Panels". Yesterday, in opposing Medicare, Republicans, the Wall St. Journal, and business groups had arguments like this one:
Business groups warn that Washington bureaucrats will invade “the privacy of the examination room,” that we are on the road to rationed care and that patients will lose the “freedom to choose their own doctor," that from the 1960s debate on medicare.
And Social Security threatened our very freedom (quotes from "The Battle for Social Security":
Daniel Reed, a Republican representative from New York, predicted that with Social Security, Americans would come to feel “the lash of the dictator.” Senator Daniel Hastings, a Delaware Republican, declared that Social Security would “end the progress of a great country.”
John Taber, a Republican representative from New York, went further and said of Social Security: “Never in the history of the world has any measure been brought here so insidiously designed as to prevent business recovery, to enslave workers.”
That the corruption and dishonestly continues isn't surprising; that so many people fail to learn from being lied to in the past is.
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